Those who returned to the village claimed that it took three days to bury the bodies. They were later to report that some of the children had their throats cut and that some of the bodies had not just been shot but had also been mutilated.
On March 16, 1968, a bloodied unit of the American soldiers stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. With military helicopters circling overhead, revenge-seeking American soldiers burned Vietnamese civilians which were mostly old men, women and children from their thatched huts and herded them into the village's irrigation ditches.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/trenches/my_lai.html